James Rush
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Phone: 480-965-5851
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COOR 4542 TEMPE, AZ 85287-4302
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James Rush was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malaysia and subsequently studied modern Southeast Asian history at Yale University, where he received his PhD in 1977. His work explores issues of colonialism and religion in 19th and 20th century Indonesia and includes the books"Southeast Asia: a very short introduction," "Opium to Java: Revenue Farming and Chinese Enterprise in Colonial Indonesia, 1860-1910," and "Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer's Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia." Other books include "The Last Tree: Reclaiming the Environment in Tropical Asia," and "Java: A Traveller's Anthology." As a public historian, Rush led the biography project of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (Philippines) from 1987 to 2008, conducting oral-history interviews with more than 100 Magsaysay Awardees and editing eight volumes of biographical essays (1991-2010). His own essays in the series include 39 subjects from East, South, and Southeast Asia, among them Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Abdurrahman Wahid, Bienvenido Lumbera, Ravi Shankar, V.E. Sarachchandra, and Fei Xiaotong.
At Arizona State University, Rush teaches the university's lower-division cross-disciplinary courses Introduction to Asia and Introduction to Southeast Asia as well as the upper-division courses Modern Southeast Asia and South, Southeast, and East Asia in the Global Matrix. Other upper-division and graduate courses have addressed the Vietnam War, the American Philippines (1898-1946), Asia in Western fiction, and Communism and the Cold War. Rush also teaches comparative colonialism in a graduate-level online course.
Rush formerly served as head of the history faculty and director of ASU’s program for Southeast Asian studies. He has served as a consultant to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Asia Society, and El Colegio de Mexico.
- Ph.D. History, Yale University 1977
- M.A. Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University 1972
- B.A. History, Gettysburg College 1966
